Much as Raymond Chandler admired Ernest Hemingway's titles, he vacillated about his own. Some that he contemplated but discarded were: The Corpse Came in Person, A Few May Remember, The Man with the Shredded Ear, Zone of Twilight, Parting Before Danger, The Is to Was Man, All Guns Are Loaded, Return From Ruin, Lament But No Tears, Too Late to Sleep, The Cool-Off. Playback refers, of course, to a "replay" of Betty's nightmare of being accused of murder with circumstantial evidence pointing in her direction: barely exonerated of her husband's death, in Esmeralda she faces the prospect of being held responsible for the death of Mitchell. However, Chandler's title also resonates in another way, inasmuch as the novel is a replay of an original movie script that Chandler wrote for Paramount in 1947.

After receiving Oscar nominations for scripts for Double Indemnity (1944), which he cowrote with Billy...